Dierks Bentley’s Departure From the Heavy Stuff

Dierks Bentley? He holds on. To his faith, love, freedom, old trucks and old guitars. But one thing he’s learned he can’t hold on to is all of the sad songs.

When I caught up with Bentley last week in Nashville, I asked him how it felt to go from a sentimental ballad like “I Hold On”
to a done-me-wrong party song such as “Drunk on a Plane.”

“To be honest, this ’Drunk on a Plane’ wasn’t really my idea for the next single. I probably would’ve gone with ’Say You Do’ or ’Here on Earth,'” he told me. “I like all the sadder and heavier songs. But you gotta give your fans a chance to recover from the heavier stuff. So it’s a good idea to go back and forth between the fun songs and the serious songs.”

Bentley is thrilled that he listened to his record label about releasing the single. “This is a great song for summer. I love singing it live in these big amphitheaters. We have it in the set list, and now people are already singing it back to us louder than I can sing it to them.”

The video for the song was about a two-day shoot they managed to shoot in one day. One very, very long day, according to Bentley.

“We flew four hours to get out there, drove an hour to this place that had a bunch of fuselages under one roof, then we were on the plane shooting for 12 hours, then got on a plane to fly back to Nashville,” he said. “The highlight of the whole thing was being able to sit in the actual cockpit of a 727 and touch the knobs. And wear the mustache.”